The Nation

After the U.S. House of Representatives voted by one vote last December to grant President Bush Fast Track authority to negotiate a sweeping Free Trade Area of the Americas, the White House was convinced that the issue was settled. So too were many of activists who had poured their time and energy into opposing Fast Track.

Because they are much more likely to feel the brunt of grassroots lobbying at the district level, House members have since the early 1990s been more dubious about trade deals than members of the Senate. So when the House buckled under intense rally-round-the-flag pressure from the White House in December, it appeared to many Washington observers that Bush would have what Bill Clinton did not: free reign to negotiate away workers rights, family-farm protections, environmental regulations and basic democratic principles in order to create a corporation-friendly free trade zone encompassing most of the entire western Hemisphere.

But appearances were deceiving. Fast Track ended up on the slow track in a Senate controlled by Democrats who were in no rush to do Bush any major favors. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, and Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Montana, generally side with Wall Street against Main Street on trade issues. But they resisted White House pressure for quick action on the issue just long enough to allow critics of corporate-dictated free trade schemes to raise serious objections to letting Bush negotiate a voluminous FTAA arrangement and then force the Congress to accept or reject the deal in a simple up-or-down vote.

Even Daschle and Baucus were surprised this week when the appeal of those objections became evident. By a voice vote Tuesday, the Senate approved a major amendment to the Fast Track resolution that the Bush administration had warned could earn a presidential veto.

The amendment, written by Minnesota Democrat Mark Dayton and Idaho Republican Larry Craig, was described by its sponsors as a move to preserve the right of American businesses, workers, and farmers to challenge unfair and illegal trade practices that threaten their livelihoods and their ability to enjoy the benefits of free and fair trade. It does this by creating an exception to the bar on congressional changes to trade agreements contained in the expedited Trade Promotion Authority ratification procedure that -- despite efforts by the Bush administration to change the name -- is still broadly described as "Fast Track."

Under the Dayton-Craig exception, senators would be allowed to strike any part of an FTAA pact that changes U.S. "trade remedy" rules. Often referred to as "anti-dumping laws," trade remedy rules allow the U.S. government to protect U.S.-based producers against unfair competition from foreign corporations that "dump" goods on the U.S. market at below the price of production. The Bush administration angered many senators when, after more than 60 senators signed a letter opposing the surrender of such protections, United States Trade Representative Robert Zoellick volunteered to do just that at last year's World Trade Organization ministerial in Qatar.

This week, Zoellick pulled out all the stops to kill the Dayton-Craig amendment. In addition to lobbying Congress, he organized a press briefing at which he and other free-trade advocates said the amendment would undermine the ability of the administration to reach meaningful trade agreements using the Fast Track authority. "You can't be for this amendment and for free trade," squealed Zoellick.

The problem for Zoellick is that he is no longer a trusted figure in the Senate. After volunteering in Qatar that he was willing to negotiate away protections for U.S. industrial workers and farmers, even Republican senators are wary of entrusting the Enron advisor with the authority to negotiate a trade agreement that would include every western Hemisphere country except Cuba and cover an area stretching from the Tundra to Tierra del Fuego.

Conscious of the credibility gap Zoellick had opened, the administration pulled in the second string -- Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman joined Zoellick in dispatching threatening to recommend that President Bush veto Fast Track legislation if it includes the Dayton-Craig amendment. "If the Senate declares trade laws 'off-limits' for negotiations, the United States will not be able to press other countries to bring their trade laws up to U.S. standards," the Bush aides warned. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer dutifully declared that the president might indeed refuse to sign a trade bill that actually directed Zoellick not to negotiate away protections for U.S. workers and farmers.

"It essentially emasculates trade promotion authority and renders all of our work useless," grumbled Jerry Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a group that -- despite its name -- promotes the interests of multinational corporations first and U.S. manufacturers second.

Senators were not swayed by any of the threats or warnings. Arguing against the administration's demand that it be given complete control over the definition of what goes into trade agreements, Dayton replied: "Under our Constitution, we do not permit one person -- no matter who he or she is -- to bargain away our laws. No one, not even the president, has that authority. No one who understands our Constitution should seek that authority."

While that principle was asserted strongly in the debate, it was a more specific distrust for the Bush administration's push to ditch protections for U.S. workers and farmers that brought a number of Republicans with records of voting for free-trade measures into alliance with progressive Democratic critics of corporate-dictated trade policies. The odd coalition held together when administration allies in the Senate attempted to kill the Dayton-Craig amendment. That move was thwarted by a 61-38 margin, and the Senate quickly adopted the measure by a voice vote.

The next day, the Senate added two more amendments the administration doesn't like -- one by Minnesota Democrat Paul Wellstone to require a study of the impact of free trade on labor conditions, and another by North Carolina's John Edwards to provide additional aid for textile communities in the Carolinas that have been ravaged by free trade. These amendments -- along with an earlier one sponsored by North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan directing the U.S. Trade Representative to renegotiate portions of the North American Free Trade Agreement that allow corporations to use trade rules to undermine U.S. laws -- mean that the Senate version of Fast Track is likely to be exceptionally unattractive to the White House.

So, will Fast Track now be stabbed to death by George W. Bush's veto pen? Not necessarily.

The Senate is still debating Fast Track, and additional amendments could be added. Next week, the Senate will probably give approval to a version of Fast Track that is substantially different from the one passed by the House. Then a House-Senate Conference committee will try to reconcile the bills. Montana Democrat Baucus, who is all-but-certain to have a place on the conference committee, voted to kill the Dayton-Craig amendment. Baucus can be expected to work with House Republicans to try and craft a new version of Fast Track that significantly weakens or eliminates the Dayton-Craig provision. The version of the bill that comes out of the conference committee will go back to the House and the Senate for new votes.

The key here is that prospect of another House vote. The Bush administration pulled out all the stops last fall to gain a one vote majority in the House for Fast Track. That win for the White House came after Republican representatives from the Carolinas were pressured personally by the president to back the measure. Now that several of those representatives are facing tough reelection fights --in large part because they sided with the administration -- they are unlikely to vote again for Fast Track.

The prospect of a new House vote has coalitions of labor, environmental, religious and human rights groups mobilizing opposition in Washington and around the country. Suddenly, the issue is back in play. And the prospect that Congress might yet thwart the Bush administration's chief initiative on behalf of its corporate contributors seems real enough to merit a major ramping up of activism by the AFL-CIO and other groups.

The first test will be the Senate vote on Fast Track. And while that may be the highest hurdle, some activists are trying to leap it.

On Tuesday, in Burlington, Vermont, local activists occupied the office of U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords, Independent-Vermont, in an effort to convince the senator to abandon his support for Fast Track. They locked themselves down in the office and, after talking with Jeffords by phone, were arrested by local police on trespassing charges.

Referring to Jeffords' decision a year ago to quit the Republican Party and caucus with the Democrats, Vermont organic farmer S'ra DeSantis, one of the activists, said, "It is appalling to me that a so-called 'Independent Senator' who did so much to take power away from the President and the Republicans is now giving back that power for the sake of free trade. If Senator Jeffords votes in favor of Fast Track he will be giving power to the president and big corporations and further undermine democracy in this country. A vote against Fast Track is a vote for democracy, family farmers, environmental protection, and working people."

U.S. Rep. Tom Sawyer, who broke with other industrial-state Democrats to back free trade measures such as NAFTA, suffered a stunning defeat in an Ohio's May 7 Democratic primary. And, despite the best efforts of Sawyer's old friends in the business-funded Democratic Leadership Council to try and explain away the eight-term incumbent's rejection at the hands of home-state voters, the message from Ohio was a blunt signal for Democrats who side with Wall Street against Main Street.

Trade issues have long been views by labor and environmental activists as the canary-in-the-coal mine measures of corporate dominance over Congress. Most, though not all, Republicans back the free-trade agenda pushed by major multinational corporations and Republican and Democratic presidents. Most Democrats oppose that agenda. Since the early 1990s, trade votes in the House of Representatives have tended to be close, however. That has meant that the margins of victory for the corporate trade agenda has often been delivered by a floating pool of Democrats -- including Sawyer -- who have been willing to vote with free-trade Republicans on key issues such as NAFTA, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and normalization of trade relations with China. Most of the free-trade Democrats are associated with the New Democrat Coalition, a DLC-tied House group that was formed in 1997 with Sawyer as a charter member.

Patrick Woodall, research director for Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, says Sawyer's defeat must be read as very bad news for those free-trade Democrats.

"If all you do is hang around at think tanks in Washington, you might think that everyone loves free trade. But, when you get outside Washington, you start running into Americans who have seen factories closed and communities kicked in the teeth by the North American Free Trade Agreement and all these other trade bills," explains Woodall, one of the savviest followers of trade fights in Washington and around the country. "Tom Sawyer's defeat ought to be a wake-up call for Democrats who think they can get away with voting for a free-trade agenda that does not protect workers, farmers and the environment. Tom Sawyer found out on Tuesday that there are consequences."

Of course, there will still be Democrats who don't quite "get it." Even as Thursday's edition of Roll Call, the Capitol Hill-insider publication, carried a Page One headline reading "NAFTA Stance Hurt Sawyer," Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., were cutting a deal to give President Bush Fast Track authority to negotiate a sweeping Free Trade Area of the Americas agreements that critics describe as "NAFTA on steroids."

But if some top Democrats were having trouble figuring out the politics of trade, Sawyer top aide was no longer suffering under any delusions. The congressman's chief of staff, Dan Lucas, said after his boss lost: "The big issue was NAFTA." And the big loser was the argument that, given a choice, Democrats from blue-collar districts will stick with members of Congress who vote the Wall Street line on trade issues. As Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee executive director Howard Wolfson delicately explained, "(In) some districts in this country a free trade position is not helpful."

Sawyer was not the first Democrat in recent years to discover those consequences. After voting for a previous version of Fast Track, California Rep. Matthew Martinez was defeated in a 2000 primary by labor-backed challenger Hilda Solis. And Rep. Ken Bentsen, a Houston Democrat who voted for the current Fast Track proposal when it came before the House last December, lost a March Democratic primary for an open U.S. Senate seat after his opponent, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, said he would have opposed Fast Track.

But, by any measure, Sawyer's defeat is the most significant so far for a free-trade Democrat in the House.

Since his 1993 vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement, Sawyer had been held up by backers of free trade as living proof that it was safe for Democrats from industrial states to break with organized labor and vote for corporate-friendly trade legislation. Despite lots of griping over his NAFTA vote, Sawyer was reelected several times by voters in a district made up of Akron -- a city where he had served as mayor -- and white-collar Cleveland-area suburbs.

In the redistricting process following the 2000 Census, Sawyer's district lines were altered. He kept much of the Akron area but took in Youngstown and Mahoning Valley towns represented by U.S. Rep. Jim Traficant. After his conviction on 10 felony counts including racketeering and bribery, Traficant decided to skip the Democratic primary and Sawyer was supposed to be safe. By far the biggest name in the race, Sawyer collected a campaign bankroll that drawfed those of his opponents. And he did not hesitate to spend that money freely on slick television commercials that filled the airwaves in the weeks before the primary.

Sawyer and his Democratic challengers agreed on most issues. But trade was the dividing line. And trade mattered -- especially in Youngstown and other hard-hit steel-mill communities up and down the Mahoning Valley. Though Sawyer had voted with labor on some trade issues -- including the December Fast Track test -- he is known in Ohio as the Democrat who backed NAFTA, and for unemployed steelworkers and their families NAFTA invokes the bitterest of memories.

"Sawyer's vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement killed him in the valley, observers agree. Even though Sawyer had a strong pro-labor voting record, that one vote was all that mattered," the Akron Beacon-Journal newspaper observed. "Mahoning Valley voters hate free trade, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement," echoed the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. ``That NAFTA vote (by Sawyer) added fuel to the fire," said William Binning, chairman of the political science department at Youngstown State University.

The fire was stoked by several of Sawyer's lesser-known opponents, who strongly opposed NAFTA. But the line from the pundits held that, even if trade turned out to be an issue, the NAFTA foes would split the labor vote, allowing Sawyer to prevail with ease. As it turned out, one of the challengers, State Sen. Tim Ryan, broke from the pack by wrapping himself in the banner of the labor movement.

Though a number of national unions backed Sawyer because he looked like a winner, Mahoning Valley unions went with Ryan, a 28-year-old Democrat who had once worked for Traficant. And, unlike Democrats who collect campaign checks from labor and then quickly scramble away from their blue-collar backers, Ryan wore his hometown union support as a badge of honor. His homey television commercials featured the song "Swing, Swing, Swing" as the names of unions that had endorsed him flashed across the screen.

Ryan didn't put many commercials on TV, however. The young candidate was outspent 6-1 by Sawyer. And most of the money Ryan did spend went into the sort of grassroots, down-at-the-union-hall campaigning that is rarely seen in American politics these days. One of the Ryan campaigns biggest expenditures was for t-shirts for his supporters. ``He defies the modern campaign,'' Binning says of Ryan.

On election night, Ryan defied expectations. He won 41 percent of the vote to 28 percent for Sawyer. Another 20 percent of the vote went to State Rep.Anthony Latell, who like Ryan identified himself as a strong foe of NAFTA.

Ryan still faces a November contest that against a Republican legislator. In addition, Traficant is running as an independent, along with Warren Davis, a veteran United Auto Workers union official. By week's end, however, there was speculation that Traficant might be in a jail cell and Davis might be out of the race by November -- creating the prospect that Ryan could end up as an easy winner in the overwhelmingly Democratic district.

No matter what happens, however, Tom Sawyer will be leaving Congress. With him should go the assumption that Democratic voters will always forgive and forget free-trade votes of Democratic members of Congress.

It's a tale of big guns and a big gun. It's a Bush family melodrama, a story of personal connections, possible backstabbing and multiple intrigues, a Washington soap opera. And it's all about an 80-ton mobile artillery system dubbed the Crusader.

Last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in something of a sneak attack, announced he wanted to cancel the $11 billion program. This was major news. The Pentagon almost never deep-sixes a major weapons program. The Army, whose baby this is, was understandably shocked. The Crusader was eight years in development. The Pentagon had decided last year to keep the program going, even though some critics--in and out of the military--had complained the heavy gun, which fires a 155 mm shell, was a Cold War relic of not much use in contemporary warfare.

Immediately after Rumsfeld targeted the Crusader, the Army initiated a rearguard operation against Rumsfeld by lobbying members of Congress to save the Crusader. The SecDef was not pleased. "I have a minimum of high regard for that kind of behavior," he growled. He ordered the Army inspector general to investigate--and caught in the crosshairs was Thomas White, the already-beleaguered secretary of the Army. White had been quoted by an ally, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma (where the Crusader would be built), as saying he was "in a fight to save [the] Crusader within the building," meaning the Pentagon.

This was not a good time for White to be on the wrong side of Rumsfeld. In earlier installments of As the Pentagon Turns, we learned that White, a former Enron executive, was responsible for one of the bankrupt company's most problematic (financially and ethically) divisions, failed to divest his Enron stock in a timely manner and misled members of Congress about it, and reportedly used official aircraft for non-official business. [See the previous "Capital Games" column: "W's Biggest Enron Liability: The Case Against Thomas White".] White seems to have survived the flaps over his travel and his less-than-truthful statements to Congress, but the Justice Department supposedly is still investigating White for insider trading concerning his Enron holdings. He is on the ledge--and he just pissed off the guy who can pull him in.

White also had the bad sense--and bad manners--to win the latest tussle on the Crusader. During a late night mark-up on May 1, the House Armed Services Committee--which was reviewing the $52 billion budget hike for the Pentagon--added a provision to the military authorization bill to preserve $475 million in funding for the Crusader. It undid Rumsfeld's proposed cancellation. This was not a shocker. Members of Congress, mindful of the jobs produced by arms contracts, are often more reluctant to cut weapons than the Pentagonists. The civilian in charge of the Pentagon--that would be Rumsfeld--was bested by the Army and Congress. Then on May 6, a senior Pentagon official, speaking for Rumsfeld, reiterated Rumsfeld's position: "The Crusader is dead." And the next day, Rumsfeld voiced his support for White: "He's doing a good job. He has my confidence."

Yet there are more budget rounds on Capital Hill ahead for the Crusader. Will White and Rumsfeld remain at odds? In past confrontations of this sort, Congress has sided with the individual service and succeeded in forcing the Pentagon to buy weapons it did not desire.

The Rumsfeld-White pas de deux was only one delicious plot-line at work. Consider the manufacturer of the Crusader: United Defense Industries. It is the Army's fifth-largest contractor, and it is controlled by the Carlyle Group, an investment firm that is practically surgically attached to the House of Bush. Daddy Bush is a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, making lots of money by giving speeches and opening doors overseas for Carlyle. James Baker, Bush I's former secretary of state, is a top Carlyle executive. He also masterminded W's legal team during the Florida recount mess. Moreover, Frank Carlucci, the Reagan-Bush secretary of defense who is chairman of Carlyle, is a close pal of Rumsfeld. The two were on the wrestling team at Princeton.

These connections have caused good-government advocates and conspiracy theorists to wonder if Bush II has been motivated to render policy decisions which would benefit Carlyle. Which would also benefit his father and W's own family, assuming Daddy Bush doesn't leave his multimillion-dollar estate only to son Neil. On the web and elsewhere, you can find suggestions (or outright assertions) that, in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush is waging the war on terrorism and expanding the Pentagon budget to fatten the Carlyle Group--which was already doing very nicely, averaging more than 34 percent on its $12.5 billion in investments. In fact, last year it did look as if Carlyle had cashed in on September 11 and its Bush contacts.

Two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, United Defense--which had revised the Crusader design and had waged a lobbying campaign on the Hill, oiled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions--signed a deal with the Army for a $665 million contract to complete development of the Crusader, now weighing in at a more slender 40 tons. On December 13, Congress fully funded the program. The next day Carlyle took United Defense Industries public. Its stock offering had listed the Crusader contract and the 9/11 attacks as selling points. The IPO was a whopping success, and the Carlyle Group earned $237 million in this deal.

Pentagon decisions certainly had helped Carlyle, for the Crusader system was a critical part of the turnaround Carlyle had achieved at United Defense. Carlyle rejected suggestions that its ties to prominent Bushies had anything to do with its good fortune. Spokesman Chris Ullman told The Los Angeles Times, "I can assure you [Frank Carlucci] doesn't lobby. That's the last thing he'd do. You'd have to know Carlucci to know he'd never do that, and you'd have to know Rumsfeld to know it wouldn't matter."

Might that have been truth, not spin? By spitting into the eye of the Crusader recently, Rumsfeld sent the stock of United Defense Industries tumbling 15 percent. That couldn't have made Carlucci, his old mat-mate, or Daddy Bush, Baker, and anyone else at Carlyle happy. So does that mean the Carlyle Group, with its behind-the-scenes clout, does not have the Bush II Administration fully in its pocket?

Cynics can still find reasons to be suspicious. Rumsfeld, after all, did not strike at the Crusader until after United Defense Industries went public. And when he did move to smother this program, he certainly had reason to expect that legislators on the Hill would cram the money back in--whether or not they were egged on by his less-than-loyal secretary of the Army. But after suggesting last week that the Army had thirty days to consider alternative designs for the Crusader, Rumsfeld then pulled the plug. That demonstrated his seriousness about ridding the Pentagon of unnecessary weapons (that is, unnecessary in Rumsfeld's book). What remains to be seen is the seriousness of the inquiry into White's end-run (not Enron) on the Crusader front.

This saga is not over. In coming installments of the Crusader mini-series, look for the roles (cameo or otherwise) played by George W. Bush and his Office of Management and Budget, as members of Congress rally behind the Crusader. Will the President and OMB back up Rumsfeld? Or will they overrule him? Perhaps Bush should recuse himself. This is a financially significant matter for the company that enriches both his father and the man who engineered his crucial triumph in the Florida post-election battle.

As of now, there are no signs from the Bush White House. But it is clear no matter what direction this story takes, it can only end one way: Thomas White getting a job at the Carlyle Group.

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If the rightwing had actual cheerleaders, they would be chanting, "What do we want? Moral clarity! When do we want it? Now." In recent weeks, "moral clarity" has become the buzz-phrase for conservatives upset with President Bush's less-than-wholehearted effort to pressure Ariel Sharon and to revive talks between Israelis and the Palestinians.

A quick tour: Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, says Bush has "lost moral clarity on terror." The Weekly Standard's William Kristol and Robert Kagan complain Bush's Middle East policy "wasn't exactly moral clarity." Thomas Hendriksen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, writes, "George W. Bush has witnessed the moral clarity of his post-September 11 vision confounded by the deepening crisis between Israelis and Palestinians." Arch-hawk and former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu huffs that Bush had shown a lack of "moral clarity" in the Middle East crisis. Senator Joseph Lieberman, joining this choir, grouses that Bush's call for an end to Israeli military action in the West Bank "muddled our moral clarity" in the war against terrorism. And author and self-proclaimed virtue-czar William Bennett asserts, "We cannot stand between them [the Israelis and the Palestinians] without losing the moral clarity of Mr. Bush's earlier message." By the way, Bennett has a new book out: Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.

This moral clarity thing has really caught on. When a reporter asked a demonstrator at a pro-Israel rally in Washington what he wanted, the fellow said, "We hope President Bush will show the same moral clarity [on the Middle East] that he has shown in the fight against al Qaeda." At a pro-Palestinian rally, a counter-protester backing Israel said he was "supporting President Bush's war on terrorism and the moral clarity he brings."

To be clear about it, moral clarity has come to mean, let Sharon do whatever he wants on the West Bank. After all, the argument goes, if Bush could portray his post-9/11 war in black-and-white terms (you're with us or you're agin' us; we blast away at terrorists and anyone who harbors or winks at them wherever and whenever we find them), then why cannot Sharon do the same? And why should Bush have anything to do with Palestinians--including Yasser Arafat--who can be linked to terrorism or who have not done enough to prevent terrorism? The MC police, who crave a full-force Israeli offensive, have been trying to appeal to Bush by shoving his Bush Doctrine in his face ("look--see, see?-- you said this") and by cloaking their strategic aim with a noble term. Who's for moral cloudiness?

But moral clarity are weasel words when used in this fashion. They negate nuance. They suggest there is a simple and straightforward solution to a difficult foreign policy challenge (blow away the so-called Palestinian terrorist infrastructure without regard to the damage done to civilians or the prospects for negotiations). When Bush finally decided to get involved--way too late--he gazed at the Middle East and saw a conflict not defined by either/or. Not white hats and black hats, as with his war on terrorism. And that has driven the MC crowd bonkers.

It could be that the MCers are having some impact. After Secretary of State Colin Powell returned from his not-very-successful trip to the Middle East--and after Sharon had defied Bush's call for an immediate withdrawal--Bush pronounced Sharon a "man of peace." Not even pro-Sharon hawks in Israel would say that of the person who was found indirectly responsible for massacres at refugee camps in the 1980s and whose troops recently stormed through the Jenin refugee camp, killing civilians. Sharon is supported in Israel precisely because he is a man of war--and many Israelis desire such a leader at this point in time. Sure, it's possible that Sharon might prefer peace (on his terms) over war. But what moral clarity comes from calling a militarist a "man of peace"?

Another interesting twist on moral clarity came when deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz spoke at that pro-Israel rally at the Capitol. For most of the event, speakers from across the political spectrum--Netanyahu, Bennett, Hillary Clinton, Dick Armey, Rudy Giuliani, Dick Gephardt, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney--voiced support for Israel and its current government. Many were trying to MC the Bushies into dropping their somewhat more-balanced view. Wolfowitz, the hawk's hawk in the Bush Administration, was not there to pressure his own boss. He expressed the administration's solidarity with Israel. But he dared to tell the crowd that "innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well" as Israelis and that "we deplore the deliberate killing of innocents, and I believe in my heart that the majority of Palestinians do so as well." The crowd booed; demonstrators shouted, "No double standard! No double standard!" When Wolfowitz spoke of a Palestinian state, the crowd jeered. He got the bum's rush.

Where is moral clarity when it comes to recognizing suffering on the Palestinian side--even when it is depicted in the gentle terms used by Wolfowitz? Afterward, there were no howls from the right (or from Democrats) that Wolfowitz was mistreated, that he was MC-PCed. If a government official had been booed off the stage by Arab-Americans at a pro-Palestinian rally (if one would even attend), you can bet that the cable TV shoutfests would be all over that story. And why was it that only a hawk--not a liberal Democrat or a labor leader--referred to Palestinians in human terms, who expressed compassion for innocents killed on the Palestinian side? (I won't get carried away here, for Wolfowitz, who hungers for war on Iraq, has not publicly expressed such sentiments concerning civilians killed or maimed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan.)

Moral clarity, as Bush has learned recently, is easier preached than practiced. When Colin Powell appeared on Meet the Press on April 21, he refused to call Sharon a "man of peace," he declined to criticize Sharon's slow and partial withdrawal, and he said that the Bush Administration would not consider taking ex-President Jimmy Carter's advice and consider cutting off aid to Israel. But at the same time, he noted that "in order to help the people in Jenin," Washington was sending the refugee camp 800 family-sized tents for "people who have lost their homes," water purification equipment, several thousand disease prevention kits, and ordnance demolition teams.

I waited for Tim Russert to ask the obvious question: What's wrong with this picture: the United States supplies Israel with weaponry needed for its offensive on the West Bank, it threatens no cutback in such assistance when Israel uses these military supplies for an operation the Bush Administration deems wrong, and then Washington spends more taxpayer dollars to help the people harmed by the Israeli attack? Isn't this odd? Wouldn't it make more sense for the United States to do all it could to prevent the violence at the git-go? Russert never got around to this query. But, indirectly, an absurd point was made: the United States ends up paying, in part, for the destruction and the cleanup. Not much clarity there. But would the MC gang have the United States do nothing after the Israeli assault on Jenin? After all, in the MC view (per the Bush Doctrine), these Palestinians are living side-by-side with terrorists--their sons, cousins, nieces, etc.-- and, in many cases, supporting them.

Moral clarity, as hurled by conservatives and Democratic hawks, is an attractive-sounding but disingenuous concept. It is an attempt to bully the president, to deny complexities, and to turn the Middle East conflict into a comic-book face-off that offers only one policy option: all-out war.